Designers are always on a look out for useful resources and applications that can give a boost to their creative potential. We bring to you a list of 10 such useful resources that can help you craft good designs and establish yourself in design business.
Web Design Library
Web Design Library offers a designer an in-depth analysis of the events related to design world. It covers all theoretical and practical aspects of visually appealing digital presentation of information. Also, this one-stop resource updates you with the latest technological innovations in design industry and sets web design standards by rewarding the best web design solutions.
Web Design Library offers all necessary web design information to you such as Web Design Basics, Photoshop, Raster & Vector Graphics, Flash & Swish, 3D Graphics, HTML and CSS, Web Programming, Website Showcase, Design Accessories, Flash Elements, Software Reviews, Web Designers’ Interviews etc.
Stock.Xchng
Stock.Xchng is a leading FREE stock photo website to download and share images. It gives a designer the freedom to browse through a huge image gallery containing over 400,000 quality stock photos by more than 30,000 photographers. You can also share your creative images with fellow designers and take feedback from them.
Stock.Xchng serves as a substitute for pricey stock photography for non-commercial and personal uses with the restrictions specified by the owner of the image. You can only use image in digital format on websites, multimedia presentations, magazines, newspapers, books, brochures, flyers, CD/DVD covers etc.
CSS Beauty
This online resource offers you a huge list of nicely crafted CSS based websites from renowned designers across the world. It serves as an effective platform for designer community wherein global designers show their creative abilities by submitting their CSS based websites giving budding designers lots of inspiration and creative design ideas.
These CSS based websites can belong to as varied categories as Business, Entertainment, Non-profit, Other, Personal, Photography, Magazine Portals, Sports etc. Besides this, CSS Beauty updates designers with the recent news and latest technological trends in CSS etc.
UrbanFonts
UrbanFonts, one of the top 50,000 sites in the world, is a well-designed and easy-to-use free font website with over 8,000 freeware fonts and dingbats (characters or spacers used in typesetting), which can be downloaded. It offers a text box where you can type in your text and change the font size, font color and background color as per your requirements. These fonts can easily be browsed in alphabetical order or by category such as “gothic” and futuristic”, both PC and MAC. You can also submit your own fonts.
In addition, Urban Font provides you a toggle button to change between a view of characters or text and also offers a great preview feature. The site also features a blog, forum and an article section that will increase your knowledge about fonts and typography.
Brusheezy
Brusheezy is a great creative destination for you that offers you a huge collection of the best custom Photoshop Brushes and Photoshop patterns on the Web. These can be easily downloaded and you can even upload your own patters on the website.
On this regularly updated website, you can easily use and manipulate your images with exquisite Photoshop brushes, which result in you coming up with professional-looking graphics. This free website also has two other related websites, Vectoreezy and Flasheezy, which enable you to download vector graphics and flash files for free.
Pixel2Life
Pixel2Life, the biggest tutorial index on the Web, has 40,000+ registered members and addresses all creative requirements of graphic designers, webmasters etc. From Photoshop to C++, this website lists over 50,000 tutorials in varied 88 categories and gives you additional resources such as code gallery, programming script, articles, hardware reviews, free images etc.
Also, Pixel2Life facilitates programmers, developers and webmasters to incorporate the functionality of this website on their websites with a pack of tools and is inclusive of the SearchBar API and the Auto-Submit API.
Hot Scripts
Hot Scripts, a comprehensive Web directory, entails a long list of over 44,000 web development and programming-related online resources in 1000+ categories that address the creative needs of coders, marketers, programmers, webmasters etc. across the globe. It caters to the demands of buyers wishing to build or improve their websites on the World Wide Web.
Hot Scripts, the web’s largest PHP, CGI, Perl, JavaScript and ASP script collection, also entails over 16 programming languages along with other dynamic development tools, books, tutorials etc. Along with these features, Hot Scripts also gives you an open forum to discuss your design queries and share your knowledge with other designers from across the globe.
IconFinder
IconFinder is a simple software program that enables you to look for and extract icon resources in separate files. Also, this program does not need any installer since the only executable file makes use of a standard system API calls.
IconFinder serves like a search engine for icons, which helps you to browse through 159 icon sets and even refine your search by pixel size thereby providing you with high-quality icons for your blogs, websites etc. in a quick and effective fashion. These icons can be downloaded in two formats, namely PNG and ICO, and can be used like a favicon icon. You also get the added ease of changing the background of these icons.
BgPaterrns
BgPatterns, a free web-based application for web designers & developers, enables you to screen a vast range of eye-catching background patterns, backgrounds & textures and then craft a fast design tiled pattern, backgrounds etc. It is a pattern destination where you can get access to varied patterns from ready-to-use images. You can edit, scale or rotate the images for drawing these patterns.
BgPatterns also enables you to fine tune the opacity of the texture of images and designs and also rotate the background image pattern. Once you tweak the images, you get to see the preview of the design instantly. You don’t need to get registered essentially to edit, scale the patterns; however, registered users can also bookmark and manage backgrounds at one destination.
WebAppers
WebAppers provides you with comprehensive database of open source resources for web designers & developers. Here you can get some of the best free icons, stock photos, brushes, fonts and design inspirations. if you are developing a website you can find some of the best Javascript and Ajax components like modal windows, menus, galleries, tool tips, charts,calendars plugins etc.
WebAppers gives all web design related information at one place. It is easy to install any suitable resource for your project. All the open source resources are available in different licenses such as Creative Commons, BSD, GPL, LGPL, MIT and License Free etc.
Hope you’d find these resources useful and enhance your design skills to keep your best foot forward in the business world. We welcome your insights and suggestions on the same.
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nice list, thanks for resources..
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great list! Pls. provide many like these
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I end up here browsing dark culture! This post probably has a not so less consideration on yahoo even if it wasn’t sadly what I was looking for